Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains—the people, places, things, and ideas that have had the most positive and negative impacts on the city over the past 12 months. Cast your ballot until 5 p.m. on December 30. At noon on December 31, we’ll reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and […]

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Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains—the people, places, things, and ideas that have had the most positive and negative impacts on the city over the past 12 months. Cast your ballot until 5 p.m. on December 30. At noon on December 31, we’ll reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

For years, it seemed as if Frederick Gardiner had had the last laugh. Though attempts to move Fort York to make way for the Gardiner Expressway failed during the 1950s, the historical site’s location, hemmed in by traffic jams in the middle of an industrial neighbourhood, did it few favours. But thanks to recent developments, the old military grounds now sit at the heart of a revitalized area of the city.

The big news from Fort York itself was the opening of its new visitor centre in September. Though still incomplete, the structure offers a visually stunning space for exhibits and other educational activities. The result of a partnership between Vancouver’s Patkau Architects and Toronto’s Kearns Mancini Architects, it has been described by the Globe and Mail as “part building, part landscape” due to its string of steel rectangular panels.

This year’s edition of Nuit Blanche took advantage of the space within the fort’s grounds (even if the entrances did create bottlenecks), as well as nearby parks such as Canoe Landing. These green spaces offer a place of respite for visitors and incoming residents amid the condo towers rising nearby—and more are in the works, including Mouth of the Creek Park. The chain of parks creates public space and pedestrian corridors, even if the Ford administration did manage to stymie progress through actions such as delaying the construction of a bridge to Garrison Common.

To serve the community’s creative, intellectual, and social needs, the Toronto Public Library opened a two-storey branch across from the fort in May. The branch offers amenities such as a digital innovation hub (complete with 3D printing) and architectural features such as wooden ceiling beams that honour the area’s historic wharves—and it has filled the large library desert that was created by the closure of the Urban Affairs Library in 2011.

While the neighbourhood emerging around Fort York will experience growing pains, it seems poised to integrate itself at last into the fabric of the city.

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them. In August, San Francisco unveiled the 1 Burrows Street Pocket Park. Once a little-used cul-de-sac, the site was repurposed as a streetside public space complete with furniture, an information kiosk, a footbridge, and […]

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Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

Landor Road, home to one of London’s 100 new pocket parks.

In August, San Francisco unveiled the 1 Burrows Street Pocket Park. Once a little-used cul-de-sac, the site was repurposed as a streetside public space complete with furniture, an information kiosk, a footbridge, and vegetation.

Pocket parks are becoming more popular around the world as cities look for ways to carve recreational space into the urban landscape. They comprise small public spaces built on existing infrastructure such as sidewalks, traffic islands, and curb extensions—and they’re perfect for urban areas lacking greenery and leisure space.

The City of San Francisco encourages community groups to create their own pocket parks (with City approval, naturally) and provides design guidelines on its website. Recommended pocket park amenities include seating areas, playground equipment, community gardens, educational displays, and community bulletin boards.

And the City points out that pocket parks can be effective at retaining stormwater, allowing it to seep into the earth instead of flooding roadways or washing oil and other street filth into the sewer system.

Toronto has a few slivers of green space wedged alongside city streets. Most of them are (as is the case with New York City’s pocket parks) situated on privately owned public spaces. We fall short of San Francisco and London—cities pursuing urban planning strategies of which tiny patches of enjoyable public space are an important part. But as our city grows and public space becomes more and more precious, pocket parks may become increasingly vital.

Toronto is home to more than 2,400 public laneways, totalling 250 kilometres. According to urban planner and designer Mackenzie Keast, they represent a major opportunity for public-space development—but we’re ignoring them. “We can’t really build new public spaces,” he says. “There’s only so much room to build and grow. [With laneways] there is an opportunity […]

Toronto is home to more than 2,400 public laneways, totalling 250 kilometres. According to urban planner and designer Mackenzie Keast, they represent a major opportunity for public-space development—but we’re ignoring them. “We can’t really build new public spaces,” he says. “There’s only so much room to build and grow. [With laneways] there is an opportunity for us to reimagine what they can be used for.”

Keast is part of the leadership at The Laneway Project, a non-profit organization established in 2014 to promote the use of Toronto’s laneways as public space, and support communities undertaking laneway development projects.

The Laneway Project wants Toronto to follow the leads of such cities as Melbourne, Chicago, and Vancouver, where laneways are filling up with cafes, small businesses, and shops, and turning into pedestrian areas full of greenery. “We want to think of laneways as another level of public space, and one that can be utilized in more and more interesting ways,” Keast says.

On November 20, from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., The Laneway Project will take over the Great Hall to host “Engaging In-Between Spaces,” a summit on laneways. A panel of urban designers, planners, community representatives, and public space experts, moderated by the CBC’s Mary Wiens, will discuss making laneways more people-friendly, using them as transportation corridors and community gathering spaces, and leveraging them for cultural and economic benefits.

“We’re trying to bring together all these voices who have been working on laneways for a long time,” Keast says, adding that the hope is to get the public talking about laneways as public space.

The Laneway Project has spoken with various City departments to gain an understanding of the different types of laneway spaces in Toronto, the zoning regulations that apply to them, and how they are served by garbage collection and snow removal services. “[It’s] all the nitty-gritty details for all the laneways in Toronto,” Keast says, “so that we can do all that work up front and provide advice and assistance to communities and stakeholders that might want to revitalize their laneways.”

When a member of the public approaches The Laneway Project with an idea, specific or general, for improving a local laneway, the organization will bring stakeholders together to plan and implement development and programming projects that suit the needs of everyone from area residents to businesses. They’ll also help communities find funding for the projects, whether through grant applications, government money, or private sponsorship.

Building this framework now may well pay off in the future, when accessible urban space is in even higher demand. “We think laneway development is an inevitability,” says Keast. “It’s something that’s going to come, because we’re kind of being forced into it in terms of … the number of people who want to move into the city.”

In public laneways, Toronto has 250 kilometres of untapped space. It’s just waiting to be put to good use.

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them. Museum Island, at the heart of Berlin, is an urban tourism haven. The triangle of land, bordered on one side by the Spree River and on two others by a bending canal, is […]

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Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

Museum Island, at the heart of Berlin, is an urban tourism haven. The triangle of land, bordered on one side by the Spree River and on two others by a bending canal, is home to five Berlin State Museum buildings, as well as the Lustgarten parklands. Currently in the works are a reconstructed historical palace and a monument to Germany’s reunification.

It’s a bustling place. But a group known as Flussbad Berlin (that is, “Berlin river pool”) wants to re-invent the canal along Museum Island, creating “natural” public space and “restor[ing] the ecological integrity of the river.”

The plan has three components. The first is the “natural” swimming pool—750 metres of canal separated by weirs at either end, reserved for swimmers in the summer and ice skaters in the winter. Those less inclined to dive in could stretch out instead on the sprawling staircases that run along the eastern canal wall, or amble along a water-level boardwalk on the western bank.

But it’s still a city waterway, containing all the oily runoff, drain water, and gunk you’d expect. So the second planned component is a natural filter—a 300-metre-long, 80-centimetre-deep layer of gravel, laid underneath a bed of reeds and other wetland plants—that would let clean water seep into the pool.

The filter would naturally purify 500 litres of water per second, enough to refill the pool completely every day. Also in the plans is a bypass tank for sewage overflow, to stop unfiltered water from spilling into the swimming pool during hard rains. Built on top of the bypass would be a pedestrian and bike path.

Continuing with the eco-friendly theme, the plan’s third component is the re-naturalization of a stretch of canal farther upstream from the filter and around a bend. The area would be converted to a shelter for endangered plants and animals, with a new urban park built at its edges.

The plan is moving along. On January 6, 2014, Flussbad Berlin held the first meeting of its advisory board, which comprises architects, urban planners, academics, and environmentalists. In July 2014, the Flussbad Berlin project received funding, in the form of 110,000 euros from the Berlin Lotto Foundation, the state lottery’s charitable arm, for a feasibility study.

City “flussbads” aren’t unprecedented in Europe. Zurich already has a pair, albeit in neighbourhoods less glamorous than Museum Island. And that’s an important point: as a tourist visiting one of Berlin’s premier architectural and historical hotspots, it would be impossible to miss the Flussbad swimming pool, boardwalk, and wildlife sanctuary. Enacting the three-part Flussbad Berlin plan would represent a commitment by the city to making nature and public recreational space a priority.

In Toronto we make good use of the natural waterways on the edges of the core. Skating on High Park’s Grenadier Pond and swimming at Kew Beach remain childhood staples. And we have our truly excellent paddles down the Don River. In terms of publicly accessible waterfront space near the city centre, we’re somewhat limited—but we’re working on it.

The Waterfront Toronto revitalization initiative has already brought the city recreational waterfront space in the form of improvements to Cherry Beach, and the unfairly maligned Sugar Beach development. Now they have re-naturalizing the mouth of the Don in their sights—a plan that would re-establish lost wetlands and improve animal habitats.

In the spirit of Flussbad Berlin, these waterfront projects make Toronto a true mix of urban and natural space. Not a city within a park, as Toronto often calls itself, but a city integrated with its natural surroundings, which in turn complement and coexist with busy urban space.

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them. Say you’re in Vienna. You’ve been schlepping yourself around all day, you’re tired, and you’re just a little too far from your hotel. Take heed, weary traveller: you can rest up at Flederhaus, […]

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Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

Photo courtesy of heri & salli.

Say you’re in Vienna. You’ve been schlepping yourself around all day, you’re tired, and you’re just a little too far from your hotel. Take heed, weary traveller: you can rest up at Flederhaus, five storeys’ worth of publicly accessible hammocks. It’s a veritable hammock district, all in one building. Even its name suggests a suspended respite: “Flederhaus” is a play on fledermaus, the German word for bat. (Though you fans of Viennese operettas knew that already).

The hammock hut was first opened in 2011 on the lawn of Vienna’s Museumsquartier, a complex of museums, cafes, and creative public space designs. In 2012, the structure moved to Flugfeld Aspern, a rapidly growing area in the city’s northeast end, where it doubles as an information centre for Aspern’s local community development project. Flederhaus’s creators, Viennese architecture firm heri & salli, are currently scoping out potential destinations for another move next year.

So could Toronto get a hammock house of its own? We did briefly have a public snoozing space last year when a sleeping pod hotel popped up at Bay and Wellington streets. That was just a marketing stunt by a nasal strips manufacturer—but there is a case to be made for streetside resting space.

Brent Toderian, an urban design consultant and former chief of Vancouver city planning, is helping to popularize the concept of “sticky streets”—city spaces that make people want to stop, linger, and enjoy their surroundings. Flederhaus gives passersby the opportunity to do just that—as heri & salli write on their website, the project is “a public space with additional value.”

CORRECTION: September 23, 2014, 9:50 AM: This post originally stated that Flughafen Aspern was in the city’s northwest end. It’s actually in the northeast.

UPDATE: July 11, 2014, 1:45 PM On Thursday city council debated a proposal, backed by regional transit agency Metrolinx, to install massive new electronic billboards along the 401 and 427. Staff had raised serious concerns about the safety issues involved and recommended against the billboards. Despite this, councillors overturned the staff report, voting 22-14 in […]

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UPDATE: July 11, 2014, 1:45 PM On Thursday city council debated a proposal, backed by regional transit agency Metrolinx, to install massive new electronic billboards along the 401 and 427. Staff had raised serious concerns about the safety issues involved and recommended against the billboards. Despite this, councillors overturned the staff report, voting 22-14 in favour of the signs.

Public space activist Dave Meslin explains just why this is such a concern—and in particular, why we should be worried that a transportation agency would advance a proposal that endangers drivers.

While all levels of government are making efforts to reduce driver distraction, the Metrolinx plan actually aims to increase distraction—and make money off that distraction, to boot.

The billboards violate both municipal and provincial regulations designed to protect public spaces and ensure road safety. Provincial rules, for instance, do not allow any signs this large within 400 meters of any highway, and do not allow digital signs to change messages rapidly. (They even prohibit blinking Christmas lights anywhere near the highway.) And the Toronto sign bylaw doesn’t allow for digital advertising at all expect in special sign districts (like Yonge-Dundas Square). Metrolinx is trying to get exemptions from all of these rules, despite the large body of evidence ([PDF], [PDF], [PDF], [PDF]) that digital commercial signage is a safety hazard to drivers.

The dimensions of one of the proposed new electronic billboards, relative to the current maximum allowable size and height. At committee, councillors voted to cut the size of the billboards in half, but keep the height the same.

At first, as this proposal made its way through the bureaucratic process, things unfolded as they should have. The City’s current sign bylaw does not allow any digital signage on the 401 or 427, so Metrolinx had to apply for what’s called a “sign variance,” which would essentially allow them to violate the bylaw’s restrictions. City staff reviewed Metrolinx’s application, and issued a report [PDF] recommending against all eight billboards. That report went to the Sign Variance Committee (a volunteer body comprised of appointed citizens), which likewise rejected all eight signs.

Rather than reconsidering the merits of their proposal, or giving thought to the negative impacts on safety and visual pollution, Metrolinx kept pushing for the bylaw exemption. Metrolinx’s corporate partner, Allvision, lobbied councillors to approve the applications. What a strange scenario: to have a provincial body in charge of transportation indirectly lobbying municipal politicians, asking them to ignore the advice of their own municipal staff on a transportation safety issue.

The billboard lobbyists are very good at what they do. They are also very persistent. Last year, a Toronto Star analysis revealed that the top lobbyists at City Hall were not representing casino companies, developers, or the island airport; the top lobbyists at City Hall are billboard firms. It’s almost impossible for volunteer citizens to compete with this kind of organised commercial effort.

On June 19, the politicians who sit on council’s planning and growth management committee voted to “delet[e] the staff recommendations” from the report, recommending instead that city council as a whole approve the new billboards. Council will vote on the issue this week.

How were the councillors convinced to support such a backwards plan?

Money. The proposed billboards will contribute a few million dollars to Metrolinx’s annual operating budget. This is, of course, a drop in the bucket for a multi-billion dollar agency, but it still works as an effective argument for politicians who are eagerly looking for new ways to fund services in an anti-tax political climate.

Amber Alerts. Billboard companies love to talk about amber alerts. With their new signs, the lives of children will be saved! Of course, MTO already has text-based changeable electronic signs that can post amber alerts, vehicle descriptions, license plate numbers, and so on.

Trade-offs. Allvision has offered to remove about 40 existing billboards in exchange for the eight new ones. Of course, the old ones are much smaller, aren’t digital, and aren’t nearly as effective or distracting as the electronic boards they want to swap in. More importantly, some of these old signs don’t have proper permits in the first place, and would have had to be removed anyway as they eroded and aged.

Brightness. The industry is always claiming that their newest signs are less bright than their older ones, but an LED screen is an LED screen. Even if they agree to lower light levels now, they are likely to raise the brightness later. We’ve seen this over and over at City Hall: councillors enter into a long-term arrangement for outdoor advertising in exchange for revenue, and within a few short years the company comes back claiming that they need to renegotiate the contract in order to remain “competitive” with other companies. The bottom line is, these companies want the brightest signs possible because brightness is distracting, and therefore effective.

Inevitability. The lobbyists have been successful at convincing councillors that digital signage is just part of the unstoppable onward march of technology. Vinyl records were replaced by 8-tracks, then cassette tapes, then CDs and finally MP3s. Likewise, paper billboards simply must be transformed into digital signs. The implication is that voting against digital signage exposes yourself as a dinosaur, unwilling to embrace the present or future. Of course, this is all besides the point. We aren’t slaves to technology: we choose what tools to implement, and how to go about it. That we now have the capacity to have brighter, faster-changing signs doesn’t mean that we should put them by the side of highways with the express purpose of grabbing the attention of people—drivers—who need to be focused on the road.

Safety. The billboard industry insists that digital billboards are harmless. But while advertising companies claim that digital signage will not dangerously distract drivers from the road, at the same time they eagerly promote these signs to potential advertisers by highlighting just how eye-catching they are. Metrolinx and Allvision have been referencing reports by consultants hired by the City of Toronto ([PDF] and [PDF]), to prove that digital billboards are safe. But just this week, those conclusions were described as “seriously inadequate and often erroneous” by a traffic safety expert who reviewed those reports. Almost every study that has been conducted shows a direct causal relationship between digital advertising and driver distraction. And the number one cause of automobile collisions isn’t alcohol or speeding: it’s distraction.

Blackouts. The current proposal calls for the signage to be turned off between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. That sounds nice, except for the fact that the sun sets as early as 5 p.m. in the winter, meaning these billboards will still be flashing for six hours of the evening.

Neighbourhoods. Because the Metrolinx application contains misleading information about visual sight lines and the impact these signs will have on local residents, without really going out and seeing it for yourself (which most councillors don’t do) their application can sound quite harmless.

How did Metrolinx—a provincial agency tasked with building roads and public transit—get mixed up with a commercial billboard company? The answer, as it so often is: money. The billboard project is part of Metrolinx’s ongoing effort to create “non-fare” revenue, which includes parking fees at station lots, leasing commercial space at stations, or in this case, monetizing driver distraction.

I’m a big fan of Metrolinx. We need to expand our transit system, and we need to find ways to fund their next major set of transit projects, The Big Move. But making money by selling the attention span of drivers to an advertising company is a bad way to go about it. Our public spaces are precious. And with over 2,000 deaths on Canadian roads each year, we can’t afford to introduce intentional distractions. Most importantly, we need to ensure that policy at City Hall is being driven not by lobbyists but by some refreshingly old-fashioned things: facts, expert advice, and the public interest.

Dave Meslin is a longtime civic activist and the co-founder of Scenic Toronto.

Brent Toderian, urban design consultant, ex-chief of Vancouver city planning, and founding president of the Council for Canadian Urbanism, wants to talk about getting sticky. Or, rather, designing “sticky streets”—avenues that make people want to stop and enjoy their surroundings. City planners have traditionally thought of street design in terms of maximizing transportation efficiency: “How […]

Brent Toderian, urban design consultant, ex-chief of Vancouver city planning, and founding president of the Council for Canadian Urbanism, wants to talk about getting sticky. Or, rather, designing “sticky streets”—avenues that make people want to stop and enjoy their surroundings.

City planners have traditionally thought of street design in terms of maximizing transportation efficiency: “How can we make it easier, faster to move through this space?” Toderian calls the product of this thinking Teflon streets—spaces that make it impossible to stick around. But sticky streets are different, he says—they “prioritize, or at least balance, the role of streets as people-places rather than just places to move through”. After all, it’s often the things that slow pedestrians down that make a street great. Prime examples are the sidewalk cafe or bar patio—both of which are a pain for planners hoping to maximize a street’s transportation efficiency, but a major asset to place-makers looking to create attractive public space.

To stickify a street, all that’s really required is an attraction that makes people want to stop and spend time there. It can be a public art installation (or, better yet, an interactive public art installation), a busker’s performance, a food truck, or a pretty store window display.

It’s no mean task to change the focus of city planning. “There is still a great tension regarding the role of streets, especially given the perceived ‘ownership’ engineers have claimed over streets in many cities,” Toderian says. “No street can be sticky that prioritizes car movement over everything else, and most streets and cities still do.” But sticky-street design around the world, including in Paris and Barcelona, is encouraging—although Toderian notes “there are just too many street-life cities to name, especially in Europe.” Copenhagen, for example, has created a year-round patio culture, making blankets a must-have accessory for street-side seating. Closer to home, New York has undergone what Toderian calls “a remarkable transformation of mindset and design” over the past 10 years.

And Toronto’s not doing so badly either. Toderian lists our St. Lawrence neighbourhood (home to the market, its Saturday produce vendors, Sunday streetside antiques sellers, ample outdoor patios, and many street performers) as a great example of street stickiness, placing it alongside the likes of Old Montreal and Vancouver’s Gastown and Yaletown.

“Cities across Canada are doing great things or, in some cases, important first steps, to embrace streets for people,” he says. “It’s fuelled by movements like the ‘Park(let)’ movement where parking spaces are transformed into small patios or public places—particularly effective when the sidewalk isn’t wide enough for generous patio life.”

As Toderian says, streets represent the most common type of public space in cities. So why shouldn’t they have the same appeal as a town square?

“Good cities know that streets move people, not just cars,” he said. “Great cities know that streets are also places to linger and enjoy.”

If you’ve ever travelled the Gardiner, you’re familiar with them: huge digital screens flashing ads at you 5,760 times a day. Now imagine them dotting the landscape across large swaths of the city. That’s what the future may hold, if city council adopts recommendations that will be coming up for debate soon. Despite the fact […]

If you’ve ever travelled the Gardiner, you’re familiar with them: huge digital screens flashing ads at you 5,760 times a day. Now imagine them dotting the landscape across large swaths of the city. That’s what the future may hold, if city council adopts recommendations that will be coming up for debate soon.

Despite the fact that new digital signs are not allowed under Toronto’s sign bylaw, three times as many exist now as did before that bylaw was passed in 2009. This has happened because council has been granting exceptions, amending the bylaw to permit billboards in specific locations when companies have asked permission to install them. And they’ve done that in large part because they hear primarily from those that will reap its benefits—namely, those sign companies. They’re the most active lobbyists at City Hall. Between 2008 and July of this year, just two companies (Astral Media and CBS Outdoors) met with councillors and staff 423 times.

Because they’re only hearing one side of the story, council has found it easier to say yes to these requests for exceptions than to uphold the existing bylaw. According to staff, the volume of requests has placed such a burden on the municipal government that it’s considering changing the rules and allowing digital billboards in commercial and industrial areas of the city, and as close as 250 metres to a residence. Some councillors are already resigned to it. They say that electronic billboards are the industry standard, that they’re here now and we just have come to terms with that and try to mitigate the effects with brightness and placement restrictions.

This, however, is nonsense. The City sets the rules. It should be up to residents and their representatives, not corporations, to decide what Toronto will look like. If we reject the move to digital billboards, Toronto will still be the largest advertising market in the country. The billboard industry will continue to do just fine.

If the City tries to appease the industry by allowing digital signs in commercial and industrial areas, the pressure will only increase. Landowners and advertisers with holdings in commercial-residential zones will have to push for a loosening of restrictions in order to compete. Then there will be pressure for signs that are closer together, bigger, brighter, with video. They will keep pushing—that’s their job.

It’s your councillor’s job, on the other hand, to consider the the evidence of advertising’s affect on constituents, communities, and the character of the city as a whole. They are the ones who are supposed to act on behalf of the public interest and safety. And in all the reports and presentations the City has produced on this issue, there is one thing that is conspicuously missing: any explanation as to what benefit passing these rules will bring to the city or its residents.

If you’re not convinced by the aesthetic argument, consider this: digital billboards are intended specifically to attract your eyes off the road—that’s their entire purpose. An Ipsos Reid poll commissioned by the municipal government this fall found that nearly three times as many Toronto drivers find digital signs distracting as compared to traditional billboards [PDF].

Jerry Wachtel, a Berkeley-based traffic safety expert, recently conducted a survey of the scientific literature and concluded that “Every study in the past five years has produced consistent findings: that roadside billboards, especially digital and video, cause significant levels of driver distraction. These distractions result in poorer speed control and lane positioning, and may increase crashes in demanding situations when unexpected events occur [PDF].”

One of the studies featured in his report was conducted in Israel in 2010. The study measured the number of crashes in selected areas, then covered up the billboards and measured again. Total crashes were reduced by 60 per cent, injury and fatal crashes by 39 per cent, and property damage crashes by 72 per cent.

Whether or not you believe the signs directly cause crashes, the one or two seconds you spend looking at a sign is one or two fewer seconds you have to respond to someone suddenly braking ahead of you. This is the rationale behind the ban on cellphone use while driving. So why would the City allow the billboard industry to profit from similarly distracting drivers?

Councillors have their eyes on upcoming election campaigns and several have indicated that if they get the message that this is not what constituents want, they’re more than willing to vote against the plan.

Public consultations are being held this week in locations across Toronto. Each will consist of an open house starting at 6 p.m., during which you’ll have a chance to give input or speak to staff, followed by a presentation on the issue starting at 7:30 p.m.

Tuesday, September 24: Etobicoke Civic Centre

Wednesday, September 25: Toronto City Hall

Thursday, September 26: Scarborough Civic Centre

Alison Gorbould is a public-space activist who has been working on billboard issues in Toronto for the past 10 years.

It was a good evening for the Toronto Police Service under the tent at Scrivener Square on Wednesday. Stantec Architecture’s design for the new 11 Division building (above) won two honours at the 2013 Pug Awards, which recognized buildings completed in 2012. The public voted the new police station the best project in the Commercial/Institutional […]

It was a good evening for the Toronto Police Service under the tent at Scrivener Square on Wednesday. Stantec Architecture’s design for the new 11 Division building (above) won two honours at the 2013 Pug Awards, which recognized buildings completed in 2012. The public voted the new police station the best project in the Commercial/Institutional category, and it received the Paul Oberman Award for Adaptive Reuse and Heritage Restoration.

Another police station, 14 Division, finished second in the Commercial/Institutional category, followed by the Rotman School of Management. Only two of the 14 nominees in the category received negative marks from online voters (those would be the Toronto South Detention Centre and the Trump International Hotel and Tower), as opposed to the 22 out of 29 projects in the Residential category. Five Hundred Wellington took the Residential award, followed by Six 50 King West Condominiums and Parc Loft Residences on the Park. You can click through the image gallery for look at some of the residences that fared the worst in the voting, and also the winners.

Pug voters’ irritation with poor public-space design around the bases of condo towers spilled into the panel discussion that preceded the awards presentation. The panelists (architect/urban designer Ken Greenberg, landscape architect/planner David Leinster, moderator Gil Penalosa, and landscape architect Janet Rosenberg) criticized the glacial pace of the City’s response to infrastructure problems associated with the core’s growing population. The word “crisis” was used several times in describing Toronto’s narrow, increasingly inadequate sidewalks. The sentiment was that we need to stop being so car-centric in our thinking and consider, as cities like New York have, street plans that better account for combinations of cars, cyclists, and pedestrians.

Also discussed was who should maintain spaces like public parks. Penalosa contrasted how quickly private funding was rounded up to repair the burnt Jamie Bell Adventure Playground in High Park with the nine years R.V. Burgess Park will have been without equipment by the time the City replaces it all in 2015. Leinster suggested two-tier public parks have emerged in places like New York, and that perhaps public money could be devoted to parks in needier neighbourhoods, leaving other parks to engaged community groups with strong financial means.

Even when infrastructure plans emerge, there’s still a political aversion to investing in critical improvements in the name of austerity. “Torontonians are real experts at saying no,” Greenberg observed. “We know how to identify the things we don’t want and fight against them. We have to now learn how to say yes to what we do want. We have to be demanding about what we do want.”

How do we make such demands? Urge the public to stop being quiet and tell city councillors to make changes that support a liveable city. The panelists pointed to examples like the uproar over the possibility of opening a casino in Toronto. Other issues, they agreed, need equally loud, powerful voices behind them.

We would add that it’s the quality of those voices that matters. While it’s important to gather everyone’s opinion, constructive feedback needs to rise above the angry, regressive voices who dominate public meetings. Complacency is not going to solve our city’s problems.

Click through the image gallery for a look at some of the night’s winners and losers.

The Regent Park Daniels Spectrum was packed on Saturday afternoon for the third annual Toronto Parks Summit. The four-hour-long event provided an update on Toronto Park People’s progress improving the city’s parks, and a heads up on what the group is planning to do next. Toronto Park People is a non-profit, grassroots organization formed in […]

The Regent Park Daniels Spectrum was packed on Saturday afternoon for the third annual Toronto Parks Summit. The four-hour-long event provided an update on Toronto Park People’s progress improving the city’s parks, and a heads up on what the group is planning to do next.

Toronto Park People is a non-profit, grassroots organization formed in early 2011. It has grown from an outfit with few staff and little money into a conglomerate of 80 parks groups. Its mandate is to inspire new innovations in the use of public space, and to make great parks accessible to all Torontonians.

“It’s really an expanding movement. As people see good things happening in other people’s parks, they want to make that happen in their own parks,” said Dave Harvey, the organization’s director.

This year, the W. Garfield Weston Foundation pledged $5 million over three years to Toronto Parks People to fund new parks initiatives in Toronto. And that’s not the only new development. “We’re expanding our resources,” said Harvey. “We’re bringing in some new staff to help us on the policy front. We’re expanding our outreach resources to help build those new parks groups, in particular with this goal of having a parks group in every ward of the city in two years.”

Keynote speaker Mickey Fearn, the US National Park Service’s deputy director for communications and community assistance, gave an entertaining speech about the virtues and challenges of running a successful parks and rec department. According to Fearn, parks and recreation is the most invisible of government services because its results are hard to quantify. Cities need thriving parks departments, he said, because good parks inspire civic engagement and environmental stewardship.

Collaboration and partnership can be tricky things to maintain. In explaining this, Fearn used a vinaigrette metaphor. Oil and vinegar mix together, he said, but they inevitably separate. In the same way, people get together on initiatives like building better parks, but eventually lose interest and go their separate ways. There must be a unifying vision to keep everyone together. Organizations like Toronto Parks People, Fearn said, act as an emulsifying agent, keeping the oil and vinegar (that is, different organizations and community members) together as a whole.

“The interesting thing is, people are getting together on things to which they feel commitment and power. So they’re willing to work on them because it causes them to feel powerful,” Kearns explained, after his speech.

“There’s these three things: critical mass, force field, and tipping point. You get a critical mass of the people working on things, then this force field emerges, and there’s this tipping point. You see Parks People getting close to that tipping point,” Kearns added.

Capping off the presentation was a series of success stories about four people and organizations that did things to promote public spaces in their communities. CBC Radio One host Jane Farrow interviewed each honoree. Of the four, the crowd favourite seemed to be Fairmount Icemasters, which sets up a skating rink at Fairmount Park every year. After a recent round of funding cuts, a crew of volunteers stepped in to make up the difference, working long hours. They even trucked in snow from hockey arenas to make tobogganing slopes. The whole episode showed that when the City trims the parks budget, local communities are the ones that suffer—and that even in the cold of a Canadian winter, parks can still bring people together.

The summit ended with a tour of the Regent Park redevelopment, including the new aquatic centre that opened up last year. Right now, a planned park area is just an open field of dirt and snow cordoned off by a chain-link fence, but soon it will be a verdant public space. The revitalized Regent Park will, it is hoped, exemplify the type of progress that Toronto Parks People strives toward.

For the last few weeks, the greenhouse in Trinity Bellwoods Park has been a hub of prohibited activity. The space has been the site of a Sunday afternoon pop-up café since the beginning of January. Officially labeled a “discussion group,” the café has been selling espresso and snacks without permission from City officials. Gene Threndyle […]

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Trinity Bellwoods’ greenhouse will host its final discussion group this weekend. Photo courtesy of Gene Threndyle.

For the last few weeks, the greenhouse in Trinity Bellwoods Park has been a hub of prohibited activity. The space has been the site of a Sunday afternoon pop-up café since the beginning of January. Officially labeled a “discussion group,” the café has been selling espresso and snacks without permission from City officials.
Gene Threndyle and Jiva MacKay are the people behind the project, which will have its final Sunday this week. They say they just wanted to create a place for their neighbours to hang out in the winter months, and make better use of a greenhouse that they say spends most of the year being used as a storage shed.

Threndyle, a gardener by trade, says he first came in contact with the greenhouse a while ago, when trying to find a place to store plants for the winter. He admits that, when he first went in, he wasn’t impressed with what he saw. “I couldn’t help but notice that the greenhouse is a little bit worse for wear,” he told us. “One particular guy has been breaking in there and sleeping for years, there were trees growing up [through the floor]. I got rid of those.”

It wasn’t until this past summer that he realized the space’s potential.

“In August, somebody got married in there, and they moved out the really ugly Home Depot shelves they’d had in there, and I couldn’t help but notice how great the space looked when it was empty,” he says. He decided that the greenhouse would be the perfect spot for a pop-up café. It was an idea that struck a strong chord when he mentioned it to his neighbour, MacKay. A trained chef, she says she’d been toying with the idea of a greenhouse café for a while.

“A few years ago, I’d gone to a green roof conference,” she said. “I’d had this vision of putting a greenhouse on a roof, and then putting a little café inside, where people could come in the wintertime and take off some layers and be sunbathed and surrounded by the vital force of all these plants growing. And Gene had the same idea, and said he wanted to put an espresso machine in the greenhouse.”

Threndyle and MacKay initially took the idea to the volunteers at Friends of Trinity Bellwoods, but Threndyle says that they “didn’t really get what we wanted to do.” Then, he spoke with Friends of Dufferin Grove’s Jutta Mason, who has spent years working both with and around the City’s Parks Department to hold unique events at Dufferin Grove Park. She told them that a café probably wasn’t going to fly. “She said ‘Well, they’ll shut you down immediately if you put a coffee machine in there and call it a café,'” says Threndyle. Instead, she suggested that they call it a discussion group, and just serve snacks while they were at it.

Threndyle loved the idea. He and MacKay started readying the space in December, clearing out what he describes as the existing plastic shelves and replacing them with cedar ones he built himself, along with some of his plants. By the first week of January, they were ready to go.

“We lined up a ton of speakers, including her, and she talked about how the Parks Department have the budget for all kinds of gatekeepers that tell you what you can and can’t do, but they have increasingly less and less money to run programs to make the parks more interesting,” he says. “We had [visual artist and long distance bike tripper] Jungle Ling talk about his bike trips, and they all turned out to be interesting little discussions that we’d have, and Jiva would bring in the food around noon.”

He adds that, by running a café out of the greenhouse, he’s not just serving up coffee and conversation. He’s trying to build a sense of community.

“There’s something very civilizing about people eating together, and it seems to be forbidden [in parks] in Toronto,” he says. “You can go across the street and get your coffee or whatever, but God forbid there be a little café in the park where you can get a coffee and meet your neighbours.”

He says that so far he’s had no objections from the Parks Department, even though he’s been bold enough to put a sandwich board out front. That said, he wasn’t really expecting any.

“They haven’t even noticed,” he says. “And I knew they wouldn’t. Someone said to me ‘Well, the Parks Department is going to notice,’ and I said ‘Yeah, I don’t think so. They didn’t notice the guy sleeping in there.'”

The greenhouse will be used to start seedlings in early March, which is why Threndyle and MacKay are getting ready to wrap up the café for the season. That said, they’re not giving up on their dream of communal dining in Trinity Bellwoods—they’re already planning a series of events for this summer.

“We’d like to have a more permanent set-up, which is very difficult with the bureaucracy,” says MacKay. “But we have the idea of doing suppers…of setting up tables under the trees one night a week, and I’ll do food.”

]]>http://torontoist.com/2013/02/a-clandestine-cafe-in-trinity-bellwoods-park/feed/8Ciclovías Open Up Streets, and the Cityhttp://torontoist.com/2013/02/ciclovias-open-up-streets-and-the-city/
http://torontoist.com/2013/02/ciclovias-open-up-streets-and-the-city/#commentsFri, 15 Feb 2013 15:11:04 +0000http://torontoist.com/?p=236485

In the future, people will be able to travel around Toronto without the aid of cars and public transportation. They can have brunch in Leslieville, fly over to hike in High Park, and enjoy dinner in Etobicoke without turning on the ignition or even doling out subway fare. Perhaps you’re envisioning a far-off space age, […]

In the future, people will be able to travel around Toronto without the aid of cars and public transportation. They can have brunch in Leslieville, fly over to hike in High Park, and enjoy dinner in Etobicoke without turning on the ignition or even doling out subway fare.

Perhaps you’re envisioning a far-off space age, each of us with a jet pack. But if you are Gil Peñalosa, the executive director of 8-80 Cities, and Kristyn Wong-Tam (Ward 27, Toronto Centre-Rosedale), the future is almost here. And that self-propelled vehicle? It’s you. On a bike. Or maybe roller blades. On foot. Or who knows, maybe on a dog sled or snowshoes in the wintry months.

Peñalosa and Wong-Tam are trying to bring ciclovías (see-clo-VI-as) to Toronto. Spanish for “bike path,” the original Ciclovía was created in 1976, and ran through part of Bogotá, Colombia. In the mid-’90s, Peñalosa, then Bogotá’s commissioner of recreation, decided to revive and radically expand the Ciclovía, to dramatic effect.

The new ciclovía is a simple concept: the city opens up certain streets to non-motorized traffic, and people are free to do as they please in the public space. Essentially, it turns long stretches of the city into a paved park. Cars are permitted to move through the city, but they are restricted to certain routes. (When you talk to him about it, Peñalosa is quick to say that the city is opening up to the people instead of being shut down or off to cars.) In Bogotá and other Colombian cities, they do this from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sundays and holidays; hundreds of thousands of people come out and take part. Other cities around the world have started introducing them as well.
“Streets are like a forbidden place,” Peñalosa says. “Almost nothing scares you as much as when your parents say ‘Watch out! A car is coming!'” But with the ciclovía, the streets “become open so people can enjoy the forbidden place.”

In Bogotá, the ciclovía is used to promote public health: exercise classes are taught in city plazas, dance parties are held in the street, and thousands of people stroll down the boulevards. But Peñalosa says that whatever happens, happens—people are more than welcome to set up small shops, pop-up schools, art fairs, and picnics. Loosen up the streets, loosen up the city.

“People are so hungry for public space,” said Peñalosa, “that when they have it, they’ll take over, and things will develop!”

Councillor Wong-Tam was visiting Guadalajara, Mexico in 2010, when Peñalosa encouraged her to visit a ciclovía there. Just a few minutes cycling around the downtown plazas got her hooked. Since then, she and Peñalosa have been working on bringing the open streets concept to Toronto.

The benefits of the ciclovía are great. For starters, the streets are already paved and well kept, so most of the infrastructure is ready and in good condition. “In a time of economic crisis, you don’t have to go to the City to ask for millions,” Peñalosa points out. There are no socioeconomic barriers to ciclovías—anyone with even a few spare minutes can participate. And unlike some special events like marathons (which also block traffic from specific parts of the city), everyone can participate. Ciclovías are open to everyone and can be in every neighbourhood, kind of like a city-wide Pedestrian Sunday.

In Bogotá, 120 kilometres go car-free, but Peñalosa says he’d like to see just a few kilometres dedicated to a ciclovía in Toronto for the first few events. Eventually the goal is to ramp up to 50 kilometres, in every part of Toronto, and encourage residents to explore. “Next Sunday you say ‘I want to go here…’ and this will connect all of these magnificent parts of the city.”

Studies have shown that pedestrian and cycling traffic are beneficial for a local economy; those who arrive by foot or bike are more likely to spend more money in a neighbourhood’s shops than those who drive [PDF]. It’s something cycling advocates pushing for bike lanes often point out; it’s likely to also apply with large numbers of people exploring new neighbourhoods and visiting businesses out of their normal terrain.

In Canada, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Calgary, Hamilton, and Ottawa have all hosted ciclovías or similar events. Ottawa, notably, has been holding its Alcatel-Lucent Sunday Bikedays since 1970. All of which makes it surprising Toronto hasn’t already hosted a ciclovía yet. There is no reason why it wouldn’t be successful; New York, a city Toronto fancies as its American equivalent, shuts down Park Avenue for its version of the event, and Los Angeles, the car capital of North America, regularly hosts its CicLAvia, to the delight of citizens and proprietors alike.

Peñalosa notes that Winnipeg was the first Canadian city to adopt the idea (in 2009), and that Paris stages a weekly ciclovía year round—the concept isn’t limited to warm-weather cities. And Toronto, with its gridded streets and fairly flat landscape, makes an ideal home.

Hopefully, now it’s only a matter of time. Pending a review by the City’s top civil servant, due in April of this year, there’s a chance we’ll see our first ciclovía in 2014.